I've been covering the video game space for 20 years for outlets like The Washington Post, Reuters, CNET, AOL, Wired Magazine, Yahoo!, Entertainment Weekly, NBC, Variety, Maxim, EGM, and ESPN. I serve as EIC of GamerHub.tv and co-founder of GamerHub Content Network, a video game and technology video syndication network that works with Tribune and DBG to syndicate game videos and editorial around the world. I also cover games for outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, IGN, Geek Monthly, CNN, DigitalTrends and PrimaGames.

With Blizzard Entertainment (a division of Activision Blizzard Publishing) riding the wave of positive press with StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, the game publisher is also celebrating The Art of Blizzard. With a new book and a new art exhibit in Los Angeles, video games continue to invade pop culture in new ways.

Chris Metzen, senior vice president of story and franchise development at Blizzard, takes a walk down memory lane in detailing the inspirations for some of the company’s biggest franchises from World of Warcraft to StarCraft to Diablo in this exclusive interview.

Where do you draw inspiration from when it comes to Warcraft and World of Warcraft?

Warcraft is shaped by a lot of different visual stills. Certainly back in 1993 when we started building the first Warcraft games it was anything from Conan, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, and all those kinds of classic fantasy troves, but with a ‘90s comic sensibility with hyper proportional, super colorful characters. It was born as all sorts of real things that we were into back in the day. Even today I can still remember the super colorful vistas and super mighty characters, and twenty years gone, there’s a lot of continuity there.

How does this compare to the character’s environments you’ve created for the StarCraft universe?

I think StarCraft from the get-go, almost as a reaction to what WarCraft was, tried to be a little more gritty, a little more realistic. Right around that same time, there was wide use of 3D rendered sprites and what started to become the big new thing in the games industry was that you could actually shoot models with directed light on a texture map. StarCraft always had more of a realistic look that I think really helped to contrast the two universes. Science fiction wants to feel a little more rusty, a little more gritty. I think they’ve always been very distinct that way.

What inspirations were there for the Diablo franchise and how did that evolve?

Ultimately, the Diablo universe was developed by a company called Condor Entertainment that would become one day become Blizzard North. Those guys were really turned on by taking a much darker spin through kind a European Gothic type underworld with dungeons and things like that. Those were really art kits and motives that WarCraft hadn’t really touched on up until that point. They felt that really made their game very, very distinct from what we had been doing with StarCraft and WarCraft.

What role has advances in technology played in bringing your games to life?

That’s an interesting question. Ultimately, technology keeps arching up and up and the benefit of it is at a video game level that you can have higher res texture maps, more polygons in a model and more points of animation and articulation. While that’s all wonderful, what we’ve always really tried to do — regardless of how crazy you can get with the art — is try to remember that it’s the simple things, the foundational things, the strong colors, the strong personality, super detailed costumes. It’s remembering that you’re telling a story with a character or a tank or an environment, so ultimately as the technology allows you to do all this crazy stuff, you still have to remember what the idea you were gunning for in the first place and how it fits into the matrix of your world building and your storytelling. Obviously, the art is much better these days because of technological advances, but the soul remains the same.

How have you video games evolve as an art form?

It’s interesting with video game art.Ultimately, from the realm of illustration, doing concept art, doing production paintings and things like that, it’s not all that different than it was thirty years ago. But obviously on the technological end the worlds we can build and the level of immersion and textural reality that can be accomplished these days is much higher than anything we could have done back in the day, relative from Doom to Far Cry. We’re in a realm where these environments and these worlds can be very convincing and anything is possible these days. It’s just remembering that escapism and the fantastical experience is what people are signing up for. So even though you can render things that almost look real-world convincing, remembering that people will ultimately want to be transported and want to have that fantastical experience, and balancing that against the realism that can be achieved with the illusion of displacement — that is the want.

What do you feel it says about game art that museums now feature exhibits?

Oh, it’s crazy, man. It’s hard to gage. I’m a dinosaur for this industry now. I’m an old man now, but the idea that this is the culture now, right? Back in high school I was a shameless geek playing D&D at the lunch tables and hoping no one found out, but nowadays kids are coming up – everybody games. My folks game on their smartphones. Gaming has just become part of the texture of our culture, so to see gallery shows and things like that and seeing these things being celebrated broadly in the pop culture, I have a number of emotional responses to that, not the least of which is it feels great to be validated as one of geek culture. Just to see people interested, people that wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as a geek, but there’s no distinction anymore. That’s what the world is now and that’s just an amazing feeling, you know.

How did you go about picking art for this book?

The process of picking art for this book was painstaking. It was something like twenty years of art and hundreds and hundreds of pieces that all we’re very emotionally attached to, that give us a charge this way or that way and it was kind of rough going through and figuring out which ones exactly we wanted to really have evidenced in a book. The process of picking the art really brought us together as a group. A lot of times, it’s been twenty years and we barely even talk anymore about a lot of this old art and it allowed us to really get that perspective. It was like this nostalgic memory lane thing, where we really got to enjoy this stuff again and really remember how precious it is and how great all these memories are. To look back at the knucklehead kids we were when we got started drawing all these pictures twenty years ago and how it is now. Our games are all around the world. In a way, this art book is a weird time capsule of all that. It’s been a really amazing process of watching it all come together.

What role have fans played in the evolution of Blizzard over the years, especially with fan art?

Man, the fan art is something we particularly love. There are sections on our website where people were constantly posting their own visions and things. You have to remember from a development standpoint, we’re working on art all the time, our concept teams, our production painters. And while it’s not always by assignment, there’s certainly always an agenda. We’ve got this zone to build. We’ve got this race to build. I have this villain over here. It’s always trying to put all these ideas together. There’s always a founding plane on how far you go creatively to achieve the assignment. What I love about fan art is that no one asked them to do it. It’s a labor of love. It’s pure vision. It’s pure emotional response. Often times, I learn things about these franchises that never would have occurred to me other than just looking through the eyes of someone that lives and plays it and was so passionate about it, that painted their own picture about it. I see themes echo in fan art that I don’t know would have ever occurred to us to chase. That keeps you honest. It’s certainly very inspiring.

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